Persuasion strategies with Oscar Wilde

Human communication is a very delicate problem. How often do we say, or hear sentences like: “I did not mean to say that!”, “You don’t realize what I want to say” or „It seems that you have not understood what is all about!”.

Every time we try to communicate, something seems to be standing in our way and we are not understood as we would have liked to. Even when we are understood, we often do not succeed in getting others to think, to behave as we would have hoped.

Every time we write or speak, trying to persuade, to explain, to educate, to influence or to achieve some other objective, by means of communication, we have in mind four main aims: to be listened to (heard or read), to be understood, to be accepted, to provoke a reaction (a change of behaviour or attitude).

According to Jean Lohisse [1], communication is linked, mainly, with language. Thus, communication represents the verbal exchange between the subject who speaks and an interlocutor - Dictionnaire de linguistique, coordinated for Larousse by Dubois(p. 12).

Etymologically, the term of communication sends to the idea of the relation with the other which could take place in different circumstances.